Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black

alternative endings

ASKED about how fiction writers bring their imagined characters to life, Graham Greene said writers create alternative lives for people they might have encountered, sat beside on a bus, overheard in loving or quarrelsome exchange on a beach, in a bar, grinning instead of weeping at a funeral, shouting at a political meeting (my examples).

A writer also picks up an imagined life at some stage in the human cycle and leaves it at another. Not even a story from birth to death is decisive; what mating, by whom, brought about the entry, what consequences follow the exit — these are part of the story that hasn’t been chosen to be told. The continuity of existence has to be selectively interrupted by the sense of form which is art. In particular, when we come to close a story, it ends This Way, that’s the writer’s choice according to what’s been revealed to the writer of the personality, the known reactions, emotions, sense of self in the individuals created. But couldn’t it have ended That Way? Might not the moment, the event, the realisation have been received differently, meant something other to the individual, that the writer didn’t think, receive intuition of. No matter how cumulative, determinative, obvious even, the situation could be, might it not find its resolution differently? This way, not that. There is choice in the unpredictability of humans; the forms of storytelling are arbitrary. There are alternative endings. I’ve tried them out, here, for myself.